
that it resembles—it is not a loss of self in one’s surroundings, but an inscrutability that is
all the more striking for being mundane.
As he goes aboard the Pequod for the first time, Ishmael meets Peleg, one of its
owners, who, upon his expression of a desire to “see the world,” orders him to “take a
peep over the weather-bow” and come back:
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
could see.
"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did
ye see?"
"Not much," I replied—"nothing but water; considerable horizon
though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."
"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish
to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world
where you stand?" (ch. 16)
Ishmael understates his own observation, displaying a reasonable awareness of the ship’s
position, and of the tides and weather, picked up, we might infer, in his time as a
merchant seaman. The sense of monotony remains, however, as any discernible qualities
of the ocean, apparent to the trained eye, arise out of an initial blankness and uniformity.
At another point in time, however, on the threshold of the Pacific described
earlier, we find a vastly different set of images:
The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but
yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. (ch. 111)
The uniform sea has been replaced with an exuberant, compounded multiplicity:
“endless, unknown archipelagoes.” It should be noted that this occurs some hundred
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